Do What You Have To Do
by Ananke
Summary: AU. The longest goodbyes are for the most transient gifts.


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Disclaimer: Star Trek: Voyager and all related characters owned by Paramount Studios. No copyright infringement intended.

Summary: Alternate Universe. If, after reading, you're still hopelessly confused, email me and I'll tell you what episode you missed. A long goodbye.

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By the time I pull myself out of my chair and my misery and get this transmission to you, it'll be late in the day. You'll be old and with other things on your mind, other places looming in the horizon. Maybe by then…maybe by now…you won't remember the things I've written about, maybe you won't remember the man who wrote about it all. This catharsis may only be good for easing my own demons. But I think you'll remember and understand and smile despite yourself, because that's you, a blazing grin and more fun-loving energy than anyone has the right to flaunt.

You got that from your mother, though she'd never have admitted it. She was always so tense, so focused...though I know from my more stealthy moves and security break-ins that she exorcized more than one fit of wildness on the holodeck, late at night when she thought no one cared enough to track her. She ran and punched and fought her human fears away when they threatened to overwhelm, I indulged mine by spying from shadows and crying more than once when I hoped no one was tracking me.

It was all gone so fast. You never learn to expect it, never come to terms, even living the dangerous life we lived back then. Theoretically life spans were moot. Death was knocking on the door of any one of us every moment. Some of us pretended not to notice the existence of that little snag we might someday, some battle, not overcome. Others, like your mother, thought of it often, studied it, were zealously resigned to it...and beat bulkheads when they couldn't be.

When Joe Carey died…it was one of the few times she shook off pretenses and openly feared. It shook her…it could have been her. I don't know what drove me to insist that she stay on Voyager when the away mission came up...she would have been useful in the end...but I couldn't let her go. It was luck Chakotay agreed with me for once, but it didn't lessen her self-castigation afterward, or the hard-hitting realizations. She was carrying you at the time, you understand. 

"I could have been killed; the baby could have been killed." Sitting on the sofa in my quarters, she darted her eyes around like a scared animal, taking in me and Harry and nothing and no one else in particular. "You would have been all alone. No one is supposed to outlive their child."

I could only rock her in my arms without words.

When you were born you immediately became the center of her universe. She always claimed to be ill at ease with you, but I've never seen a better parent...I know I never was one, though I tried. You were her hopes incarnate, foolish as such a label might seem…she'd become comfortable in her own skin after a long time of wrestling with her duality, but you were still just human enough to be a star in her sky. And later on, when we found out that by some anti-hybrid genetic quirk your DNA was rewriting itself and torturing you, I think she wished she'd never been born, that she hadn't passed her flaws along. At times I wished I had fallen for someone safer, not started the mess by loving an alien.  But safety was never really relevant to us Voyagers, however we pretended.

For a while you were out of control. We didn't know if we'd wake up one day and find you in cardiac arrest, or three decades older. You were in pain almost constantly the first weeks of your life, wracked with drugs and therapies and measly, demented techniques to try and turn you back into the perfect newborn we had all cooed over and adored.  Eventually you stabilized, and while your growth rate was no less astounding, you weren't in pain, and your mother found her holodeck again and beat away whatever fears clung. But god how much more tense she always was afterward.

She never dealt with losses well, witnessed or simply distantly acknowledged possibility. When Kes went she lost it. She didn't let on at first, your Mom, she held her mask together for a respectable length of time with 'meant to be' platitudes and extra workloads, but eventually the human aspects ate through. I found her in my Corvette on the holodeck one night, crying her heart out. When she saw me she screamed and threw and kicked and let the human side I loved about her seep through...I finally calmed her and held her. We suffered together, and eventually found our ways of moving on.

Her greatest fear was leaving her friends and family behind, alone. Much as a needy child she was, she was also a warrior, determined to protect her own, suffer for them. She didn't want anyone to suffer for her or because of her.

Harry and I have talked about it more than once, the last time being hours before your mother passed away, one of us on either side of her bed, gripping a hand. That was the way she always wanted us in pictures, her Starfleet and her vagabond, sheltering her. She kept apologizing…just when I'd think she was completely senile and perhaps mercifully in her own reality, she'd grip my fingers and shake them, whispering over and over her apologies for leaving. I lied to her then, the finest lie I ever told, assuring her that the Doctor and I were on the verge of finally approving a medicine that could slow your growth rate, that you could be a normal human and that you might even outlive the lot of us remaining, like you'd always wanted. You could be so happy, her human child.

She laughed for me and cried, and I gathered her in my arms for the last time with Harry by our side and you on the other side of the hospital locked to your own machines, just as you are now, hours later. I'm going to do what she would want me to do, what I have to do, stand up and kiss her goodbye before I drag Harry up from his sorrow and we both walk to your bedside and tell no lies, because you've never needed them, with your knowing grin and wise nature. 

God, Andrew. No one is supposed to outlive their child.

FIN


End file.
